Central to Kant and Hegel’s projects is our reconciliation with evils in the world: through what Michael Rosen calls the doxa of historical immortality. The European Enlightenment’s response to the 1755 Lisbon Earthquake involved soteriological visions of a trans-historical humanity that often overlooked the accompanying dehumanisation of colonised they simultaneously damned.

In this paper, I present the Straits Chinese philosopher Tan Teck Soon’s own project of reconciliation at imperial peripheries, as a Chinese colonial subject in fin-de-siècle British Singapore. In face of the inter-imperial violence of the coolie and flesh trade, Tan offers a Daoist-Idealist response, developing the doxa of Daoist immortality alongside that of historical immortality. With this, Tan proposes that (i) the progressive ideals of a nation’s spirit is to be found in popular expressions, where its growth is otherwise constrained by imperial artifices; that (ii) wuwei to be thus understood as an possible means for an individual to live beyond their own lifespan and contribute to a pool of possible ideals for developing a global humanity; and that (iii), paradoxically, “the tragedy of human life is thus the solution to the problem of evil.”

Ironically, while traces of Tan’s intellectual labours then might still be discerned in the national progress of Singapore more than a hundred years later, his philosophical contributions have been otherwise damned to oblivion—by us who inherit both philosophy’s colonial legacy as well as the legacy of fin-de-siècle Straits Chinese philosophy.

Lilith Lee is an Assistant Professor in History of Philosophy at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, with research interests in ethics, social & political philosophy, early & Straits Chinese philosophy, as well as comparative/world philosophies. Recent publications of hers include “Receptive Publics in Colonial Contexts: The Case of the Straits Philosophical Society” (Topoi) and “The Cycles of Heaven and History: Some Notes on Approaching Historical Immortality and the Project of Reconciliation from a Look at Nineteenth Century Straits Chinese Philosophy” (The Journal of the Philosophy of History). Her forthcoming article, “Eurocentrism as Disease: A Pathology between King and Qing” (British Journal for the History of Philosophy), analyses the complex criticisms that Lim Boon Keng levels against Eurocentric philosophical theories and practices du jour as an early and crucial instance of a uniquely Straits Chinese hybrid philosophy.